“SCIENCE IS REAL,” declared The Sign, which for a time seemed to glare at me from almost every house in the neighborhood. I’ve always hated yard signs, but that one redefined “obnoxious.”
Like every claim on The Sign, this one was both obvious and, in another way, false. Of course science is a real thing. No one doubts that scientific inquiry has value, enabling mankind to learn important truths about the natural world. It doesn’t follow that scientists are always reliable, that they can’t be biased, or that authorities wearing the mantle of “science” should be treated as authoritative on all subjects. One of the first steps in civil discourse is expecting people to state their position clearly and without artifice. The Sign was a lovely tutorial in how not to do that.
Walking through the gauntlet of obnoxious yard signs, one feels a certain weariness. It feels as though nothing changes; the acolytes of science will never let go of their petty grudges. But perhaps that’s not true. After reading Spencer Klavan’s new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you may find yourself thinking over the many strange turns that science and religion have taken over the centuries in their dance vis-à-vis one another. It could be that a new era of friendship is just around the corner.
Swinging “science” as a cudgel against religious traditionalists is an old trick. Science and religion are not truly enemies, but there can be tensions between them. Sometimes those flow from particular areas of disagreement, as for instance when new empirical evidence seems to run contrary to traditional beliefs about the solar system, the flood recounted in Genesis, or the origin of species. In principle, those kinds of tensions can be resolved through good-faith exchanges between scientists and theologians. The former need to seriously consider what their data truly show, while the latter must try to discern which theological claims are truly embedded in core doctrine (as opposed to just common belief). Presuming that God is not out to trick us, we could see apparent areas of tension between science and faith as exciting opportunities to increase our understanding on both fronts. Sadly, those conversations in practice haven’t always been so friendly.
From a very early point, science and religion were allies and, in a sense, cousins. So what happened?
Religious fundamentalism can be part of the problem. It’s easier to dismiss scientists as heretics than to work seriously through the implications of their findings. But the fundamentalist impulse would be more easily tamed if scientists had not repeatedly demonstrated their real hostility to religious faith. Individual scientists can, of course, be people of sincere faith, but across the modern era, the scientific establishment has played a large role in developing and mainstreaming a reductive materialism that is deeply incompatible with Christianity (and most other faiths). The science can be separated from the materialist philosophy, but scientific apologists aren’t always interested in drawing that separation. Indeed, for some, science is exciting primarily as a vehicle for advancing materialist paradigms. For popularizers like Richard Dawkins, science appears to function as the substance of a kind of nihilistic faith. Darwin’s Origin of Species is their Scripture, modern medicine their sacraments, and the scientific method their credo.
Klavan tells the story of how this came to pass. It takes him just over 200 pages, but in historical time his narrative spans millennia, beginning in ancient Greece and continuing to the present day. Klavan is fascinated by the relationship between man and matter. Human beings are corporeal creatures, living in a material world. But it’s always seemed obvious that there are aspects of human nature, and indeed the universe itself, that go beyond the merely material, and making sense of that relationship is difficult. Plato asked: What is justice? It’s not something you can hold in your hands. To him, the goal was to look beyond the physical to deeper realities that must underlie the universe. Plato, accordingly, had little interest in natural science. But his star student, Aristotle, did take a real interest in the material world, trying to connect the things we see and touch with the metaphysical principles that fascinated his teacher. Aristotle worried about the forces that enabled things to move, and tried to understand whether or why it was possible to step in the same river twice. The Greeks laid a foundation for a metaphysics that recognized the reality of matter without reducing everything to it.
In later centuries, when Christianity became the dominant faith of the West, it was obvious to its adherents that there was much of value in the Greeks. They too believed that man was a rational creature, and because they saw the natural world as God’s creation, it was reasonable to expect that it would be “permeable” by human reason, reflecting his order and grandeur. That convergence formed a foundation for natural science in the West.
It’s uplifting to look back on this history. From a very early point, science and religion were allies and, in a sense, cousins. So what happened? How did the quest to explore creation lead to the rejection of creation itself?
In a curious way, human beings may have fallen prey to their own magnificent success, and the pride that so readily accompanies it. As Klavan recounts, the world did indeed yield its secrets to human minds. Our capacity to uncover natural order (and use it to our advantage) turned out to be stupendous. From the Enlightenment, natural science became a spectacular success story and from its success flowed a wealth of material benefits. It was remarkable, transformative, overwhelming. In time, that success of empirical science gave birth to what Klavan refers to as the “small gods” of materialism. The elegant Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics had been swept off the table, replaced by a determination to find material explanations for everything. Who says that there are things beyond the physical? Are we sure we can’t hold justice in our hands? Or, if that is truly impossible, are we quite sure that justice is a real thing?
The dehumanizing possibilities of materialism are unfortunately all too familiar to us today. Here’s the truly strange part, however. Here in the twenty-first century, the scientific framework of philosophical materialists is remarkably dated. Apologists like Dawkins still see the material world through the lens of Newtonian physics. They want to reduce human beings to mere matter, meat machines, clunky bits of stuff moving around bumping into each other. Science has moved well beyond that now.
In the late chapters of the book, Klavan considers the scientific developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which dramatically transformed the way scientists think about the material world. James Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism paved the way for Einstein’s tremendous breakthroughs, which changed the way we think about the relationship of matter, energy, and time. Then came the quantum revolution, and everything we thought we knew about mind and matter just exploded.
We have seen how scientific successes can beget both pride and grave philosophical error. It’s time to work on healing that damage.
It was a bedrock assumption of the old system that a thing had to be in a given place at a particular time. Does it, though? It was assumed that a thing that moved from point A to point B must pass through all the space in between. But are we sure about that? It turns out that atoms are nothing whatsoever like billiard balls, and in exploring the subatomic realm, physicists stumbled into a startling discovery. There appear to be things at this level that behave as material objects are “supposed to” do only when we’re looking at them. “Quantum equations don’t describe the outlines of a world we can see and touch: they describe the limits where things cease to become tangible or visible,” writes Klavan. “The world beyond those limits is not made of solid objects.”
Some might be tempted to dismiss the quantum revolution, treating the subatomic world as a phantom or fantasy. But we know things about it, and have used quantum mechanics to accomplish remarkable things. Clearly it is real. The only reasonable thing to do at such a juncture is to readjust our paradigms once again, accepting that the old way of thinking about mind and matter was inadequate. For a theist, that might be exciting. Once again, we uncover whole new layers of creation, wonderful and strange (and extremely useful). Once again, it turns out that our rational minds have remarkable capacities that enable us to fathom the mystery. Thanks be to God!
For the materialist, the situation is much grimmer. He was very attached to his chunks of stuff.
As one would expect, many scientific materialists have tried to save their metaphysically impoverished faith by coming up with clumsy fixes. They talk about “multiverse theory” or “supervenience.” Some people are willing to say or believe almost anything rather than crack the door to the possibility that a Creator might actually be “the simplest explanation” for what we see around us every day.
Science is indeed real, and no one who loves God should be distressed by the study of his creation. Indeed, we should overflow with gratitude for galaxies of wonders, stretching unfathomable distances in every direction and yet also waiting to be uncovered in a realm too small to be seen. We have truly been blessed. At the same time, we have seen how scientific successes can beget both pride and grave philosophical error. It’s time to work on healing that damage. Light of the Mind, Light of the World gives some clues as to how it might be done.